


The Why of Things (Turtles All the Way Down Remix)

by slipstream



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)
Genre: Buried Alive, Canon Character of Color, Cave-In, Discovery, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Near Death Experiences, Subways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 22:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7332301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipstream/pseuds/slipstream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Buried alive after a subway station collapse, Bernadette Thompson wishes she hadn’t erased that conversation with April O’Neil from her mind.  Lucky for her Donatello spent all that time in the Hashi learning not to break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Why of Things (Turtles All the Way Down Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the tmntflashfic tumblr community, prompt 001: Beginnings. This started as a flashfic, I swear. Special thanks to all those who contributed their knowledge of New York subway stations and Terry Pratchett so I could write this fic.

Most days, Bernadette Thompson catches a cab to her job as executive producer for the Channel 6 evening news, but today she takes the subway.

Her very first boss in the industry was a sexist, chain-smoking pig with an unsavory fascination for pantyhose seams but a nose for news so keen that it took ten years and an on-air racial expletive for the good old boys upstairs to finally force his resignation, but for all Bernadette’s disgust towards the man there is one lesson of his that she’s carried with her from one news room to the next.

“ _Why?_ ” he would snap, one hand pounding the desk in front of him while the gaggle of wet-eared newsies cowered before him, their pitches clutched tightly in trembling hands.  “For _fuck’s_ sake, I can drag in a string of jackasses off the street and get a half-decent report of _what_ happened.  I pay you to find out the _whys_ of it.  That’s where the Pulitzers are.  I don’t _care_ —”  Bang!  “—that the US is bombing some patch of dirt in fucking Nowhere-stan!  Tell me about the general with ties to the defense industry who proposed the campaign to the president!”  Bang!  “Tell me about his drug habit and the effects of the bombing on opiate trafficking!”  Bang!  “Tell me about the senator he played football with in high school using the campaign to boost his foreign policy credentials in all of his major stump speeches!”  Bang!  “Why!”  Bang!  “Why!”  Bang!  “ _WHY!”_

So, the _what_ of it:  Bernadette Thompson lives within two blocks of the 168 th Street station, where the 1 train waits to whisk her down to Lincoln Center, practically at Channel 6’s front door, but generally she cabs to work or has one of the station vans pick her up if she needs to go out to a scene.   

The _why_ seems easy enough to spot—a limp that worsens as the day draws closer and closer to deadline and a desire to save as many of her steps as possible for the frantic back and forth hustling that precedes the final countdown to air—but for any seasoned news professional that’s just the tip of the causality iceberg. 

 _Why_ the limp?  _How_ did the injury arise?  There’s a rumor popular with the interns that it’s a souvenir from her time reporting on the slaughter of drug-related gang murders in Upper Manhattan in the mid 80s, work that won her her first Press Club award.  This is partially true; she _had_ been shot while out interviewing a source, but it had been a police officer at a squad firing range, and the ricochet had only torn a hole in her sports coat. 

Thank god for shoulder pads. 

If questioned directly, Bernadette will freely admit to the true source of the injury—she’d torn almost all of the ligaments in her knee playing doubles tennis with Peter Jennings’ personal assistant in 2002—but that doesn’t stop the gossip mill.  Nor does it stop the usefulness of the rumor when it comes to  bullying some humility into the occasional six two rugby player on summer break from Columbia.  Bernadette is a hard-nosed woman with a closet full of custom-molded orthopedic flats that cost more than the rest of her wardrobe combined; she didn’t make it to executive producer by being anything other than sensible.  

On air, she allows nothing but the truth.  _Off_ air is a whole different story.

As for the subway, well... 

There’s nothing relaxing about reporting the news, and she’s learned the hard way how important it is to minimize her stress in her daily routine.  Just look at April O’Neil.  Smart, great in front of the camera, with just the right mix of persistence and hunger that made Bernadette stop and _listen_ to her pitches.  Good teeth, which never hurts.  There was potential there, a spark she recognized from her own young days in the news room, but it all blew up in her face, passion slipping into paranoid delusion and what choice did Bernadette have, really?

She’s met her fair share of monsters in this city, but none of them has been literally _green_.

“Beautiful day, Ms. Thompson,” says the doorman as she steps out onto the sidewalk, and boy but he isn’t kidding.  The unseasonably mild fall has only just started to dip into jacket temperatures, but with the sun positioned just perfectly in the gap between the new high rises shadowing her quiet street the breeze is invigorating instead of chilling.  Her leg is feeling surprisingly good this morning, but her breakfast shake sits unsatisfactorily in her stomach, so Bernadette decides between one step and the next to turn left instead of right, her feet carrying her towards her favorite Greek bakery and the subway station half a block beyond it. 

Yes, there’s nothing relaxing at all about reporting the news.  That’s why humanity created tiropitakia.

She’s licking the last of the feta crumbs from her fingers as she waits for her train, flicking through her phone with her other hand as she idly debates which trashy romance novel in her Amazon Prime queue would best serve as today’s commute reading, when a sound from the inbound tunnel catches her attention.  Bernadette frowns, unable to pick out what, exactly, about the low, rattling roar is out of place, but as it draws closer and closer the people around her start to shift instinctively away from the platform edge, their mouths thin and brows furrowed with uneasy confusion.  It’s an instinct Bernadette learned to suppress early in journalism school, so she ignores the growing rumble under her feet and pulls away from the shrinking crowd, thumb automatically switching her phone to camera mode as she peers around one of the station pillars for a better look.

The roar is louder now, almost animal as she catches the first glimpses of light as the train clatters into view, rocking drunkenly as it rounds the final curve.  Definitely coming in hot.  At first she thinks the train’s right headlight is out, but then the dark shape she thought was the driver climbs _upward_ , to the _top_ of the train, revealing the square glow of a completely empty compartment. 

Too late, she realizes that there’s no metal whine of brakes.

Her feet try to pull her backward, but her eyes can’t seem to tear themselves away as a second shape joins the first, the two merging briefly before splitting apart.  Everything happens too fast for Bernadette to make sense of it all, but just before the train emerges from the low tunnel one of the shapes tumbles back over the front of the lead car.  Her shoulders draw up as Bernadette drops her phone, unwilling to film their inevitable death, but the shape twists in mid-air, thick legs spread impossibly wide to brace itself on the tracks as it lands. 

With a shower of sparks and an even more deafening roar, it lowers its head and slams into the oncoming train.  Screaming, human and metal, as the train crumples and bucks on the tracks, rearing up precariously on one set of wheels without slowing.  She can’t see if there are people in the cars, but she thinks there are more dark shapes clinging to the flashing silver roof.

Bernadette turns towards the exit.  Train and figure are nearly level with her now.  It flings its huge head back, bellow triumphant as the front of the train rears upwards. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Bernadette gets a glimpse of horns.  White teeth bared in a deadly grin.

The first car jumps the track.  Then the second, collapsing sideways and plowing through a row of support columns. 

She can’t run fast enough.

She—

 

*

 

Bernadette does her best not to think about the details of it, afterward.  Better for everyone that way.  But lying in the hospital, buzzing along the hard edge between being in too much pain to sleep but not enough pain to warrant an increase in her already significant opiate dosage, her well-trained mind can’t help but turn the events of the day over and over, searching for a pattern, for a _why_ that can make sense of it all, only to draw up short. 

Sometimes, the why of things is as frustrating and simple as this:  it was a beautiful day; her leg didn’t hurt; she decided to go for a pastry.

 

*

 

“Ma’am?   _Ma’am!_ Can you hear me?”

Dark.  Dusty.  Bernadette comes to coughing, ears ringing and head feeling like she’s just gone a couple of rounds with  Evander Holyfield.  She’s lying on a hard, uneven surface, with somebody hovering over her close enough that their breath rattles faintly across her cheek.  Can feel something else there, too, hot and oozing.  _Blood_ , she realizes half a moment later.  Can’t tell if it’s hers or not.  Shock is an amazing anesthetic, but she’s been in enough tight spots to know now is not the time to let herself fall back into it’s comforting buzz.   She needs to figure out where she is, how badly she’s injured, needs to—

Her right leg _screams_ at the attempted movement, and Bernadette, shocked at the intensity of the agony, screams with it.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, _don’t move_ , it’s okay.  Shhh...”

“God,” she whimpers. “Oh my _god_.” 

“ _Shhh_ ,” the voice whispers.  “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

The pain rages for what feels like an eternity, but eventually she’s able to bite it back, grunting and swallowing enough bloodied saliva that she starts to feel nauseous.  

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

Something about the voice’s low and oddly formal huskiness make her decide that the speaker is male.  “Bernadette.”

“Bernadette.”  Most people chew up all of the syllables in her name, try to make her answer to _Berna_ or _Bernie_ or—god forbid— _Bertie_ , but it rolls off of his tongue as natural as breathing.  “My name’s Donnie.  I’m going to get you out of here, okay?  I _promise_ you.  We’re going to get out.”

Out?  Out of _where?_

She gropes blindly, trying to feel out the parameters of _here_.  Everything is jagged, unforgiving.  Her fingers pick out the regular, geometric pattern of laid brick, but when she probes further, expecting a wall, she finds only broken edges, then nothing.  Beyond the nothing, more hard, unforgiving chaos, bricks and rock and traitorous juts of metal waiting to stab her in the dark. 

 _Crashed,_ the train _crashed_ , which means she’s—

“Even breaths, Bernadette.  I know it’s hard, but you have to stay calm.  Can you do that?  Slow, even breaths.”

“ _Fuck_!” It’s a fight to calm herself, to slow the frantic beating of her heart.  “The station collapsed, didn’t it?”

Donnie sighs, a feathery puff of air against her forehead.

“Yeah.”

“And we’re trapped here.”  Her breath hitches in her throat.  She reaches upwards, trying to find him, trying to find something, _anything,_ that’s soft and familiar and human, but finds only a broad, scarred surface as rough and unyielding as bone.  It’s so _dark_.  “We’re _trapped_ here!”

“Not long,” he insists.  “I’m getting you out, remember?  But I need your help.  Need you to be my hands.  Think you can do that?”

There’s an odd, strained edge to his speech, but he sounds like a soldier, an old one with the scars to prove it.  Despite herself, Bernadette trusts him instantly.

 _Calm, calm._   There’s nothing practical in panic.  She allows herself one last, shuddering breath.

“Yeah,” she says.  “I can do that.”

“Good,” he pants.  “Need some light, first.  There’s an old camera flash mounted on a horizontal steel rode just above my left shoulder.  See if you can find it.”

“Where are you?”  She sweeps her hands out again, upward this time, and feels two pillars of warm, oddly textured flesh braced on either side of her shoulders.  “Is that you?”

“Affirmative,” he says.  Definitely military.  The dry, pebbled surface of his skin could be burn scars, or maybe just a leather jacket that her shock-numbed fingers have mistaken for thick, heavily muscled wrists.  She gives one arm a squeeze.

“Right or left?”

“Right.  I should be lined up directly on top of you, if that helps.”

She follows the arm upwards, frowning as her fingers pick out some sort of electronic device strapped to his forearm, then a faintly fluttering bicep as big around as her thigh.  Special forces, maybe; that would explain why he jumped out of nowhere to tackle her instead of getting the hell out of dodge like any sane human being.  The curve of his shoulder gives way to a backpack strap, and she traces the line of his collar bone from right to left, knuckles brushing past the faint droop of a beaded necklace while her wrist bumps into something hard and unyielding right at the level of his pectorals.  Some sort of plate armor?  What’s a soldier doing waiting for the 1 train in full tactical—

“Back a bit, those are my suspenders.  There’s another strap...  Yeah, that one.  Follow it back and it should run right under the camera mount.  Feel it?  Square switch on the side.”

The rough canvas feels like silk to her raw fingertips.  She traces it upwards until smooth, cool metal juts across her path.  Tries to fit it into place with the leather jacket and body armor and what she remembers about the people standing around her on the train platform and draws a blank.  “What the hell are you wearing?”

“About that,” Donnie says at length.  “It’s... kind of hard to explain, but—”

Bernadette finds the switch.

There’s little color but grey in this dust-caked world.  Bernadette blinks, briefly blind after so long in the dark, and squints up into the face of her savior through the harsh back lighting. 

Glasses.  Tortoiseshell with tape securing the nose bridge.  Night vision goggles.  Some sort of... mask?  Chin like a cornerstone tapering gradually into a bald, scabbed scalp, nose nonexistent but for two broadly spaced slits, eyes an almost translucent grey, more scabs spreading down his cheeks and neck and chest and the heavily-grooved hard plate armor isn’t a vest like she thought, it’s like it’s been welded directly onto his chest, the edges worn and organic looking as they curve around his ribs and dip over his hips to disappear into the band of his pants.  The skin there is scabbed, too, and as Bernadette’s gaze sweeps back over his body, trying to make sense of it all, she catches glimpses of green through the dust, harsh shadows outlining each of his straining muscles until there’s no pretending anymore that that’s scar tissue under her fingers.

“Oh my god.”  Bernadette forgets, temporarily, exactly where she is.  “You’re an alien.”

He smiles at her—crooked, boyish, each tooth bigger than her thumbnail and gleaming white—and lets out a little huff of strained laughter. 

“Technically, ma’am,” he says, with the faintly flat edge of someone quoting a very, very old joke, “I’m a ninja.”

(The ghost of April O’Neil looks up at her, eyes smudged dark with exhaustion and yesterday’s mascara but jaw set with the defiant conviction of someone who knows they’ve already been fired.  “They do karate,” she echoes.  A child’s voice coos out of tinny laptop speakers as four palm-sized turtles scramble after a bite of cheese pizza.)

Behind Donnie’s massive green shoulders, blood pink in the harsh light of the flash, looms the unmistakable rimmed curve of a shell.

Behind that, equally unmistakable and faintly groaning as Donnie struggles to hold it up, is a crisscross of steel beams, cracked concrete, and brick and tile facade that used to be the subway station ceiling. 

“ _Oh my fucking god!_ ”

 

*

 

Bernadette is a sucker for second chances, for comeback kids and underdogs called up from the bench only when the team has nothing left to lose.  They make great filler on slow news days, something for the anchors to relax into with soft, smiling diction when their mouths got too hard reporting yet another string of murder, war, and corrupt politicians. 

It’s that weakness that Vern had exploited, two weeks after he single-handedly captured the criminal mastermind known as the Shredder and 48 hours after he’d managed to blow up his brand new company vehicle (retribution, he’d explained hastily, low-level Foot soldiers armed with pipe bombs seeking revenge, he was lucky to escape with his life, thankfully he’d gotten this _feeling_ that—). 

“She’d kill me if she knew I was telling you this,” he’d said during commercial break, looking faintly cartoonish with his made-for-TV spray tan and oversized sling.  “But some real nasty stuff came out about her dad’s death.  She was having a hard time dealing with it, so I tried to get her to channel it back into the work.  I think I pushed her too hard, though.  She’d been wanting to make a break into hard news, but the timing was all wrong and she ended up seeing zebras whenever she heard hoof prints.”

“Turtles,” she’d said.  “When O’Neil pitched it to me, it was giant, mutated turtles.”

“Yeah, well...”  After two weeks of seeing him feign bashfulness while basking in the spotlight, there was something satisfying in seeing him shift awkwardly in his seat.  “Once in film school I was up a week straight doing the editing for my documentary final, and I could have _sworn_ I saw a UFO take off from the dean’s back lawn.

“She’s a good kid,” he’d finished, which was a bizarre way to describe a grown woman of 27, but Bernadette’s eldest was nearly the same age, and she’d understood.  “She just needs a chance to prove it.”

 

*

 

“I know it’s a bit of a shock,” says the seven foot talking turtle ninja with what’s left of the 168th Street station balanced on his shell.  Each syllable forms a little puff in the still-settling dust from the collapse.  “But we don’t have time to go into long explanations.”

Bernadette unglues her eyes from him long enough to survey the confines of their rubble pocket.  Somehow, it feels even smaller in the light.

“ _Jesus,_ you’re really holding that shit up?”  All of the swearing she’s not allowed to do on TV seems to be coming out of her at once.  “It’s got to weight fifty fucking tons!”

“More or less,” says Donnie evasively.  From the slight tremble at his elbows, Bernadette guesses more.  Maybe a _lot_ more.

“How long do you think you can hold it?”

Another strained, white-toothed smile.  “Long enough to be rescued.”

Neither of them acknowledges the unspoken “hopefully” hanging ominously in the hot, dusty air.

“Okay.”  If there’s one thing Bernadette doesn’t want to do, it’s die.  If there’s two things she doesn’t want to do, it’s die crushed beneath the living, breathing evidence of a truth she’d once dismissed as delusion.  “How do we make that happen faster?”

Donnie ignores her, however, eyes widening as he catches sight of the cut oozing down the side of her face.  “You’re injured.  I smelled blood, but I thought it was—”  Nostrils flaring, he twists his alarmingly long neck to peer down the cramped space between them.  “Where else?”

There’s no use hiding it.  “My leg.  Think I broke it.”

“Your right?”

She nods, biting down hard on another flash of pain.  Her physical therapist is going to _kill_ her.

Donnie swivels his head to get a better look, huffs in frustration as his glasses slip down his nose.  “It’s pinned,” he reports.  “Right at your calf.  If it’s not a closed break, then the weight of the block should at least keep pressure on the wound.  Can you feel any wetness up your pant leg?”

She doesn’t want to touch it, afraid of what she’ll find.  Gingerly, she forces her trembling hands below her waist, careful this time not to make any sudden, twisting movements. 

“Dry up by my femoral,” she says, remembering horror stories her ex-husband used to tell her about the ones that bled out before he could ever transfer them to the operating table.  “Can’t reach down further than my knee to check there.”

“That’s okay,” Donnie says.  “Let me know if you start to feel light-headed; I’ve got something we can use as a tourniquet.  Now what about the rest of you?  I hit you pretty hard as the roof came down.”

Slowly, meticulously, Donnie guides her through a thorough pat down of her torso.  Bernadette definitely has some bruised ribs, maybe a few broken ones if the flare each time she breathes too deep is any indication.  She palpates her abdomen, heart rate pounding as she brushes aside more and more rubble, but after some careful, painless probing Bernadette lets out a sigh of relief. 

“Nothing internal, as far as I can tell.  Think I might have a concussion, though.  I keep thinking I’m talking to a turtle in horn rims.”

“I get that a lot,” says Donnie solemnly.  He shifts his weight, squaring himself ever so slightly, and one of the cracks spreads two inches further, raining small flecks of concrete onto her face.  “Now let’s get out of here.”

 

*

 

To Bernadette’s horror, Donnie’s super mutant rescue plan boils down to basically a smart phone app.

“It’s not an app,” he whines.   “It’s a custom homing code that translates GPS relay response time into depth when pinged off of designated targets.”

“You’re running it off of a cracked Moto X taped to a Playstation controller mounted on your wrist.  Pretty sure it’s an app.”  Bernadette frowns at the sideways screen six inches from her face, trying to make heads or tails of the display.  The only thing she recognizes are two tiny icons in the corner: a cell tower and a cluster of steadily increasing bars.  “I still can’t believe you get a signal down here.”

“I get a signal _everywhere_ ,” Donnie puffs.  “Now listen carefully, this gets a bit tricky.”

He walks her through the longest, most counter-intuitive unlock sequence Bernadette’s ever encountered:  no less than twelve digits interspersed with seemingly random jabs at featureless points on the screen _plus_ a complicated series of swipes he apologetically explains is the deactivation code for the emergency retinal lock (“In case my main systems are compromised”).  Bernadette has a good idea about why he’d be so security conscious, being a mutated, humanoid terrapin capable of speech scratching away a living in the shadows of one of the most densely populated cities on the planet and all, but it’s not until his home screen literally bursts into view that she realizes it’s not just his body that needs protection.

“First step is to disable the hologram display,” says Donnie casually, as if fully-interactive 3D interface systems aren’t the stuff of science fiction and CNN’s most fervent wet dreams.  “My pack with the reserve power system got smashed in the collapse, and on battery it eats a lot of juice.  We don’t know how long it’ll take them to realize we’re—uh, I mean, to dig us out.”

Bernadette tries desperately not to think about exactly how many tons of earth and steel and concrete and turtle stretch between her and the sky again. 

She settles on the most convenient distraction.  “What the hell are you doing with all of this gear?”

“A scout is always prepared,” he quotes evasively.  “Okay, this part’s simpler than the unlock, it just uses the controller.  You know which ones are the square and circle buttons, right?” 

It is not, by any stretch of Bernadette’s imagination, simpler.  At least once the phone is back in flat mode things are laid out in a format she recognizes.  There’s a text notification from a contact listed only as string of pizzas and a laughing cat face, time-stamped to a little over an hour ago.  What little of the text she can read in the preview is so heavily abbreviated and emoji-ridden that she can’t make heads or tails of it in the few seconds that it lingers on the screen. 

Bernadette can’t be certain, but she thinks his wallpaper is an extreme close-up of cake frosting.

"Okay, I've got it from here," says Donnie.  Then, in a crisp, clear tone: “Initiate locater sequence Cerebro.”  The phone flashes green and pulls up a multi-layered map.  Bernadette tries to get oriented as the map zooms in on their location, but the dense clustering of straight lines and junctures don’t correspond to any streets she recognizes.  “Ping targets two through four.”

Three dots flit to life on the screen—red, blue, and orange—and the display splits into two windows, one displaying the map, the other a rapidly-scrolling stream of numbers in corresponding colors.  Donnie lets out  sigh of unmistakable relief.

“Ping target one, broad-spectrum emergency broadcast.”

A fourth dot joins the screen, purple and faintly pulsing. 

“Is that us?”

“That’s us.”

Bernadette stares at the screen, fascinated by how unreal and sanitized their situation is when rendered digitally.  In the upper right hand corner of the screen, something else catches her attention.  Something that she doesn’t have to be a tech genius to understand.

“You’ve only got 60% of your battery left.  Will that be enough?”

“Oh definitely,” he says.  A drop of sweat slips down his temple, leaving a dark trail in its wake.  “Trust me, I do this all the time.”

 

*

 

Bernadette has covered collapses before.  Twenty years before the World Trade Center there was the Rookland tenement block in South Bronx.  The whole south face had fallen away, killing six.  She’d been there as they’d pulled the last survivor—three years old, bloody, nude from the waist down, screaming desperately for a mother who wouldn’t be found until two days later—from what was left of his family’s apartment.  It had been a hard day for everyone, followed by harder, angrier months as she ruthlessly ferreted out the all-too-familiar whys of poverty and overcrowding and building inspectors willing to turn a blind eye as one unit was cut into two, sometimes three, and never mind what structural alterations were necessary to make everyone fit.

Her second Press Club award.  She’s never had the stomach to display the plaque, but the boy had written her once he was grown with a boy of his own.  She doesn’t display that, either, keeps it tucked away in a box beneath her bed, safe between her passport and her children’s graduation photos.

She’d known about the heat, about the thick air, the suffocation and thirst.  The fear.

She hadn’t known, couldn’t _fathom_ , the restlessness of it, the volume of her own thoughts as her brain tries to buoy itself in the void.

“What was that thing?”

“Hm?”  Donnie’s eyes are closed, brow furrowed in concentration.  Sweat has soaked completely through his mask, revealing a dark, royal purple beneath the dust.  Bernadette doesn’t know how long they’ve been down here; with no clock integrated into Donnie’s map, the only way she has to track the time is the slowly depleting battery display.  “What thing?”

Her mind swims as she tries to make sense of what little she can remember.  “That thing that knocked the train off the tracks.  Big and grey.  Sounded like a bull on steroids.”  She looks up the length of Donnie’s arms, slim only because the rest of him is so very, _very_ big.  “Was it something like you?”

The crease between his brows deepens, mouth a thin line.  He’s silent for a long, long time.

“No,” he says at last.  “There’s nothing else like me.”

Four turtles in a tank.  Dark shapes on the roof of the train as it fell.  “What were those blips on your phone, then?  The colored ones on the map.” 

“Nothing,” he says, quicker this time.  “Just drones.  They—”

Something shifts in the rubble above, the drawn-out, creaking rumble catching them both by surprise.  One of the beams balanced on Donnie’s shell lifts up unexpectedly, letting through a gust of damp, shockingly cool air.

“They’re digging us out!”  Frantically, Bernadette starts to drag her upper body closer to the newly exposed gap.  “Hey, _hey!_ We’re here!  We’re down—!”

“Get back!” Donnie barks.  His eyes are wide with panic behind his glasses, hands sliding in the rubble as he tries to adjust to the sudden shift in weight.  “Shit, _shit,_ no no no no—!”

With a final, skull-piercing groan, the beam crashes back into place. 

 

*

 

“Oh fuck!”

Dark again.  Somebody is swearing.  Is it her?  Bernadette faintly remembers rolling back to safety half a second before a shower of bricks fills the space where her body had been.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck...”

Wait, it’s not _entirely_ dark.  There’s a dim, green glow less than a foot from her face, the rectangular outline hazy in the freshly kicked up dust. 

“Donnie,” she coughs. “ _Donnie!_ ”

“Oh _fuck!_ ” he gasps.  “Bernadette, you okay?”

“Yeah.”  She feels dizzy, but that’s probably just the adrenaline crash.  “What happened?”

“Somebody shifted the load up top.”  His voice is higher-pitched than before, cracking slightly on the vowels.  “Don’t think they could have gotten heavy machinery down here, even if they were desperate enough to try, but maybe they’re trying to use tunneling tools to punch through.  Somebody might have cut through a beam without realizing it was balanced on a fulcrum.”

A desperate sort of hope flares suddenly in her chest.  “That means they’re close, though, right?  Do you think they can hear us?”

“Maybe,” Donnie says, and that’s all the permission Bernadette needs to scream herself hoarse.

After what feels like an hour, she collapses, breathless, ears straining for an answer.  Nothing.

“See if you can hit one of the beams,” Donnie suggests.  “S.O.S.  The vibrations might carry back up to where they can hear.”

It’s an agony to sit up.  Bernadette has to steady herself using the straps of Donnie’s pack, but no matter how much she stretches, she just can’t reach.

It’s been a long, long time since she’s let herself cry in frustration.

"Hey, _hey!_ Don't give up now.  The camera flash might be out, but at least the phone and homing app are still running.”

Bernadette scrubs the wetness from her face with blistered hands.  At least the cut to her cheek has finally scabbed over.  “Oh _now_ it’s an app.”

Donnie jerks his shoulders in what she guesses was meant to be a shrug and smiles guiltily.  “To-may-toe, to-mah-toe.”

There’s something so incredibly _young_ in the gesture that it makes Bernadette pause and do some quick mental math.  She’s been thinking of him as older, as a _soldier_ , but that’s not right, is it?  April couldn’t have been more than ten in the video she’d shown her, and the turtles had been tiny things.  Were turtle years the same as human years?  If they’d been babies then, then that’d make Donnie closer to...

“How’re you holding up?”

Donnie’s grin is all bravado now.  “Well enough that we’re not dead yet.”

Yep.  Definitely a teenager.  “You know what I mean.”

That attempt at a shrug again, though this one ends in gritted teeth as the muscles of his shoulders cramp in protest.  “I’m okay.  Like I said, I do this all the time.”

“Save people or bench press a train station?”

“Little bit of both.  And technically, I think I’d call this a weighted push up.”

He looks different in the dim glow of the cell phone.  The body that was so harshly monstrous in the unforgiving backlight is no softer in the shadow, but there’s a sleek deadliness too him that’s almost beautiful, his dark green skin glistening like something poisonous and tropical.  Easier also to see the scars, pale as moonlight, that streak across his body like a meteor shower. 

_What did they do to you?_

Donnie’s glasses slip another precarious half inch down his beak.  Unthinkingly, Bernadette reaches up, and pushes them back into place.

Donnie blinks, pale eyes enormous and round with surprise.  “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she says awkwardly.

Donnie peers down at her, as if really seeing her for the first time.  “You remind me of someone, but I can’t pin from where.”

To Bernadette's surprise, it's a sentiment she understands completely.

“You remind me of my son.  Smart.  Good at getting into trouble.”  She gestures towards the slowly crumbling debris pocket around them.  “Total stickler for the exact meaning of things.  Good thing, too.  Only thing that got him _out_ of trouble, sometimes.”

Donnie nods.  “Rules lawyering.  That’s what Leo always—”

He snaps his mouth shut abruptly around the rest of the sentence, eyes locked on a point just behind her head.  Bernadette notes the slip and weighs her options carefully before deciding that sometimes, it’s just best to presume some things are off the record.

“Exactly.  He’s are real lawyer now—contract negotiations.  He’s good at what he does, don’t get me wrong, but Thanksgiving dinner is a _nightmare_.”

Donnie snorts, biceps quivering.  “I can imagine.”

Bernadette studies his face, eyes drawn to the patch on his cheeks where the scales soften into something closer to human skin, the lightening of his coloration around his nose and mouth.  There are creases there that she doesn’t remember seeing before, frown lines racing up from his chin to disappear under his mask like cracks in a marble statue. 

“Really, though, how are you feeling?  You grilled me all about my leg, seems only fair I get to return the favor.”

“A little like Atlas,” he answers honestly.  “A little like...  Are you familiar with the unmoved mover paradox?”

“No.  Sounds familiar, though.”

“It deals with infinite regress, the presumption that A is true because B, and B is true because C, so on and so on, forever.”

Bernadette lets her head fall back with a thump, headache pulsing stronger than ever.

“I take it back.  You’re way, _way_ more like my daughter.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She thinks about her laugh, her fire, her frustration as she fought to be heard, to be understood.  “The best.”

“Oh.  Uh.  Of course.”  Bernadette’s not sure if turtles can blush, but Donnie certainly manages to look flustered.  “Right, so...  The unmoved mover is a component of monotheistic cosmology, an outside, primary force that sets the rest of the universe into motion.  The paradox comes from trying to rationalize how the mover itself—or themself, if you presume consciousness—was set into motion.

“In more colloquial terms,” he continues, “there’s a story about a scientist giving a lecture on astronomy.  The Big Bang, origin of the Earth and the rest of the solar system, why and how orbits work, the formation of stars, the classics.  At the end of the lecture an old woman comes up to him, tells him he’s wrong, the Earth is flat and balanced on the back of a giant turtle, which is standing on the back of another turtle, which is--”

This at least, she’s familiar with.  “Pratchett,” she says.  “Janessa’s a fan.”

“Your daughter?” 

Bernadette nods.  “Darren’s my son.”

“Good names,” says Donnie earnestly.  For the first time, she wonders if it’s short for anything.  “What is she?  Witches or City Watch?”

“City Watch is the ones with the police, right?  She used that bit about the cost of boots in her letter of intent for grad school.”   

"Really?"  For half a moment, the trembling of his muscles seems to fade.  “What’s she studying?  Criminal justice?  Socioeconomics?”

“Theoretical mathematics.  She had this whole metaphor about hidden absolute values of numbers and set theory.  Or something like that.”

“Do you still have a copy somewhere?  I’d love to—”

“If you’re trying to distract me," she interrupts, "it’s not going to work. You grilled me all about my leg earlier, but you still haven’t my question.”

Donnie cringes apologetically.

“It’s relevant, I swear.  The infinite regress part, at least, one turtle on the back of another turtle, on the back of another turtle, on and on and on, all the way down.”

His voice is soft, steady, but something in his tone still frightens her.  She gropes for his hand, wrapping her fingers as best she can over the prominent metacarpals and bulging tendons.  Watches with a heavy heart as the touch ripples through him, whole body trembling with his herculean effort.

“ _Donnie_.”

He laughs, high, desperate.

“I’m just saying...”  He ducks his head, teeth bared in a grimace masquerading as a smile.  “I’d give _anything_ for another turtle right now.”

 

*

 

She doesn’t mean to sleep.  Doesn’t _want_ to sleep.  Something deep inside of her keeps screaming that she has to stay awake, has to keep talking, has to keep _Donnie_ talking.

“It’s okay,” Donnie pants. “You need to rest.  Save your energy.”

“Just a few minutes,” she mumbles.  The phone screen blinks twice in warning as the power level dips below 15%.  “Wake me up if I’m out any longer than that.  Promise?.”

“I promise,” he repeats.  And then, to himself, almost like a mantra:  “I promise, I promise, I promise."

 

*

 

“Mom?”

_(MAMA!)_

_“_ Mom!”

( _MAAA-MAAAAAA!_ )

“Mom, Mom, it’s time to wake—”

 

*

 

“Bernadette,” Donnie gasps.  “You still with me?”

She’s tired, so tired.  Must be losing blood somewhere after all.  Her tongue is thick in her mouth.  Swollen.  “Yeah, baby.”

“I don’t want to alarm you, but—”  He coughs, gags.  Something wet plops onto the dirt next to her.  “I’m starting to have... a little trouble.”

It’s a struggle to open her eyes, harder still to focus them. 

The faint tremble she first noticed in his elbows hours and hours ago has grown and spread into a full-blown tremor.  His head hangs limp between his shoulders, glasses nearly slipping off of the end of his beak.  His eyes look smaller, older, like this.  He’s looking at her, but he doesn’t seem to _see_ her, pupils distant and hidden behind a pale white membrane that reminds her of the third lid of a cat.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he slurs.  “But I need your help again.  See that block, down to your left?”

There’s a hunk of rebar-studded concrete roughly the size of a schnauzer lying snug against her left hip.  “Yeah.”

"Do you think you can pull it upright?  Not lift it, tilt it on its edge so th’ top is wedged against my plastron.”

"That your front?”

“Yeah.”  One lip curls up in a ghost of a smile.  His eyes go a little less distant.  “Bet you didn’t think... you’d be learning so much ‘bout turtles today.”

“That’s the good thing about what I do,” she says, reaching for the hunk of concrete and trying to gauge its weight.  “I never assume I’ll know _anything_ about what’ll happen each day.”

He doesn’t press the conversational opening with anything beyond a vague “Huh,” and that, more than anything, spurns Bernadette to action.

She has to turn herself painfully onto her side in the small space between his braced arms to get the right leverage, glad for once that she’s gone completely numb from the right knee down.  It takes all of her remaining strength to tilt the block the five inches needed to shove her good knee into the exposed gap underneath, leaving her too breathless to swear as the rough edge of the block scrapes through her pant leg and into the flesh beneath.  She rests for a few minutes, weighing the blocks new balance point and her own diminishing strength, until another breathless hack from above pushes her back into action.

“Come _on_ ,” she grunts.  The block lifts, wavers, threatens to fall and break her other leg.  “Come on you fucker, come _on_!”

Panting, sweating, vision going white at the edges, she finally wedges the edge of the block into one of the seams crisscrossing Donnie’s lower abdomen. 

“ _Fuck!_ ”  She collapses back onto the rubble pile.  “Oh fuck.” 

Donnie gasps, legs giving out with a jolt so sudden that Bernadette sucks in a breath and braces for the end, but his arms and improvised kickstand both hold.  Uncountable tons of precariously balanced steel and concrete creak in low, angry protest.

“Donnie!”

“’M okay,” he mumbles.  “S’fine...”

Things are obviously far from fine, but Bernadette doesn’t press the point.  She gropes for Donnie’s hand , finds it almost buried, now, pushed slowly but inevitably into the fine layer of grit that’s settled between the larger hunks of crumbled brick facade by the weight of the world above.   

“Donnie,” she says.  “Baby, talk to me.”

“Notta...”  His voice is feathery, almost ethereal.  “”M not a _baby_ , Raph.” 

Her heart sinks.  She squeezes his wrist as tightly as she can.

“Right.  What was I thinking?  You’re a big grown turtle with a plan, right?  A plan to get us _both_ out of here.  Right?”

“Right,” Donnie says distantly.  She squeezes him again, a child tugging insistently on the string of a helium balloon, trying to keep it from drifting away.

“ _Right_.  So what’s the next part of the plan?  I’m your hands, remember?  What do you need me to do?”

His eyes drift closed, but by the desperate flutter of movement beneath the lids she can tell he’s fighting to stay awake.  “Y’know... Jenga?”

“Always been more of a Connect Four gal, myself.”  No laughter this time, Donnie’s mouth hanging limp and open.   Bernadette raises her voice.  “Hey!  What about Jenga, Donnie?”

“Gotta...”  He swallows thickly.   “Pull the bricks out.  One by one. Loose ones only, or the tower’ll...”

“Got it,” Bernadette interrupts.  Even letting Donnie mention the _possibility_ of a further collapse seems to be an open invitation to disaster. 

Luckily, bricks are one thing they have in abundance.  Many are broken, others are still clumped together with mortar and plaster, but in the dim light Bernadette can see a few choice specimens resting on top of a nearby rubble pile.  She grabs one and holds it up in front of Donnie’s face for him to see.

“Like this, Donnie?  We need bricks like this?”

“Perfect,” he breathes.  “Now you gotta... stack ‘em.  Three at a time.  Alternating directions.  Like Jenga.  Y’know Jenga?”

Her chest feels heavy with the old, familiar ache.  Bernadette lets go of his wrist, brushes one hand across his cheek.  The skin there feels cool, clammy.  What temperature is normal for him?   “Yeah baby, I know.”

“Need a broad base,” he continues listlessly.  “Distribute th' weight.  Somewhere flat.  Sturdy.  High as you can go, ‘til you touch my chest.”

“Your plastron, you mean.”

He lets out a huff of air that might have once been a laugh.  “Toppa the class...”

She has to shift herself back over to the right in order to make room for the tower.  For such a simple task, it’s agonizingly slow going.  Five rows up she runs out of bricks within easy reach, has to dismantle her work to make space for herself to worm back to the left to search for more, biting her lip bloody to hold in the scream as she struggles against the shackle of her pinned leg.  Just one more brick, just one more...

Donnie lets out a low, trembling whine.  “ _Bernadette_...”

“Almost there.”  She steels her hands against the panic in his voice.  She wouldn’t be executive producer if she couldn’t handle the pressure, the tight deadlines, the need to think on the fly and make crucial decisions right up until the final countdown to air.   “Almost...”

The last brick fits into place less than half an inch from Donnie’s heaving chest. 

“ _There!_ ”

Donnie rolls his head weakly.  “Where?  I can’t...”

“Here.”  She reaches up to press against his plastron, one hand on either side of the tower.  The bone is faintly warm beneath her fingers, the deceptively smooth surface coated with fine crosshatching of slowly healing nicks and divots.  “Here.”

This time, he eases onto the support slowly, giving the bricks of each layer a chance to shift and settle .  There’s a crack loud as a gunshot as his elbows lower him the half inch needed for the tower to sit flush against his plastron.

Bernadette can’t tear her eyes away from the makeshift tower as the bricks grind restlessly against each other.  Miraculously, it holds.

Donnie lets out a sigh that’s more pained than relieved, forearms spasming as they adjust to the new position.  Feeling helpless, Bernadette tries to rub some relief into every muscle she can reach, her own fingers trembling with exhaustion.   

“Shhh,” she soothes.  “I’ve got you.”

“Houza...”  Earlier Donnie sounded like he had to force himself to push out a single clause with each breath.  Now, he struggles to get out more than a word at a time.  “Phone?”

Bernadette checks the battery life.  Wishes she hadn’t.

“It’s fine,” she lies.  “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

“Dad,” Donnie wheezes, almost too quiet for her to hear.  “Wan’ma...”

He doesn’t say anything after that.

 

*

 

She dozes, on and off, tucked as much as she can beneath the shield of Donnie’s body.  Dreams strange, distorted dreams, voices and picture flashes from the past, a mix of real and unreal.  Like somebody took pages at random from her photo albums and tried to piece together the myth of her life.

Here’s Bernadette Thompson, beat reporter, shiny polyester blouse buttoned high on her neck, back straight as iron and hair picked into a perfect halo.  

Here she is holding hands with the man who says he will always love her, who gives her two children and a string of glimmering, broken promises before she cuts those hands away. 

Here are each of those beautiful children, tall as mountains, unruly as the sea, crashing into her and pulling away in turn until all of her sand has eroded away, leaving jagged, unyielding bedrock. 

Here she is, moments away from a lifetime of pain, and here is the after, face and leg swollen, bandages yellow where the stitches leak.

Here, she’s _here_ , deep, deep in the dark, alive only by the grace of chance and the strength of a monster she’d dismissed as a figment of madness.

Here is the truth that cannot be ignored:

He’s dying.  _She’s_ dying, if the slow numbness creeping up her torso is any indication.  It’s a race she doesn’t want either of them to win.  A race with a finish line that seems to draw closer and closer without either of them ever taking a step.

“Donnie.”  Her voice sounds dry, alien.  He doesn’t twitch, doesn’t stir, limp and sagging on the alter she’s built for him.  Maybe he’s dead already.  “I know you can’t...  I know you’re scared of me.  Of _us_.  People.  That you have to protect—”

This, she has only glimpses of.  Four turtles in a tank, a child cooing behind a camera.  A symbol painted over and over again in the dirty corners of the city, like a ward against evil.

“I don’t know who they are, but I know you don’t grow up to do the things you do all on your own.  You have to have somebody to love you, and you to love back.  And I—”

Here she is, lost, unmoored.  No hand to hold but her own.

“I just want you to know—”

Here she is, pulled up again, a mountain at each side, their palms smooth and strong.

Here is the world, turning.  Drifting.

Here is the turtle who holds up the world.

Here is the turtle who holds him up, and the turtle who holds him, and the turtle who holds _him_.  On and on, all the way down.

“They’re proud of you, baby.  They’re so, _so_ proud.”

 _'Here is the end,’_ Bernadette thinks, dazedly.  ‘ _Here is where it all ends_.’

She listens for a contradiction.  For a breath from above.  A sign. 

With a final, plaintive beep, the screen on Donnie’s phone goes dark.

Silence.

Silence.

She closes her eyes.

 

*

 

“—here, this way!  I think I found—”

Clatter of stone against stone.  A groan that might be steel bending, might be her own voice, protesting deep in her chest.  A puff of air as the pocket of rubble around her grows, expands as it, _she_ , breathes again, rain of small pebbles around her as they both cough dry, ragged coughs. 

“—nie?  _Donnie!_   Can you hear—”

“—mebody with him.  Careful—”

“—my _god_ , that’s my—”

“Hold on, ma’am,” says a voice, close, deep, decisive.  A hand slips itself into hers and squeezes tight.  “We’re going to get you out of there.”

More groaning, _screaming_ , metal jaws unwilling to yield their prey.  Hands on her shoulders, moving down her body to the places she can’t feel, lifting and shifting and pulling until she slides free of the dark and into a circle of headlamps.  Blinking, she tries to find Donnie, but nothing on this planet is as it should be, the landscape a chaos of steel and brick and dust. 

“—is he—”

“—bad shape, but I think he’s—”

“—the stretcher, quickly—”

“—need to get her—”

“—sey, do you think you—”

“—ust _go_ , I got this—”

The hand holding hers lets go, only to be replaced by another, smaller, gloved.  Bernadette struggles to make sense of the shadows in the dark; this one looks like a man dressed in coveralls and a hard hat, his face almost completely covered by a dust mask.  He flicks on a flashlight and waves frantically into the distance.

“Over here!” he shouts.  “Found another one!  _Survivor!_   Over here!”

Things happen very quickly after that.  A swarm of bodies appear, all masked and helmeted, clearing the last of the rubble and transferring her to a hard plastic back board.  Once she’s strapped in and her neck securely braced, the gloved hand slips away, the unknown man vanishing into the crowd of rescue personnel passing her hand to hand until she’s free from the collapse and once more looking up at the familiar, orderly tile on an intact station ceiling. 

“Donnie,” she asks, over and over in her delirium.  “What happened to Donnie?”

“Was there somebody else?” asks a medic.  “Was there another person in there with you?”

Yes, no.  She doesn’t know how to answer.  She’s starting to feel her leg again, and wishes desperately that she couldn’t.

Despite the care of her rescuers, the stairs are excruciating.  Bernadette emerges from the subway, once more a creature of the surface, and finds the night waiting for her.  How long were they—? 

There’s a flurry of flashing lights she’d recognize anywhere as a press pool as her back board is attached to an awaiting gurney.  She thinks she hears a familiar voice shouting questions to the EMTs, but she can’t quite place it.  The buildings above her stretch to dizzy, glittering heights, the sights and smells of the city an assault after so long in the close, quiet dark. 

The gurney bumps as she’s loaded into the back of an ambulance, stars giving way to the nauseating gleam of stainless steel.  Oxygen mask on her face.  Someone with scissors is cutting off her sweat-encrusted clothes.   Where’s Darren, Janessa, _Donnie_.  Her mountains, she wants to see—

“What’s your name, ma’am?” says the body ripping her from her shell.  “Can you tell me your—”

Everything goes black.

 

*

 

Her first day back in the news room is so cliché it makes her gag.  Everyone from the doorman to the pimple-faced mail boys in the elevator insists on nodding at her, their smiles knowing and a little mischievous.  Some even go so far as to call her _Chief_.  It’s no surprise, then, when she steps out onto the newsroom floor to a chorus of clapping.  There’s balloons and a big banner over the door to her office reading WELCOME BACK, BOSS!  No sheet cake that she can see, but she hasn’t been to the break room yet.

“Sit down, _sit down_.”  It’s hard to wave her crew off properly without dropping at least one of her crutches.  A camera is one thing.  This many pairs of eyes and beaming faces turned her way live and in person is another thing entirely.  “We’ve got work to do.”

They don’t disperse quickly enough for her liking, so she bangs a crutch against a nearby trash can and tries again.  “Eight hours until deadline!  Don’t think I haven’t been watching the crap you’ve put on air while I’ve been gone!  Let’s move it!”

This scurrying is more to her liking.  But there’s one face in the crowd that she doesn’t want to leave quite yet. Bernadette reaches out and catches her by the yellow sleeve of her jacket as she passes.

“O’Neil.  Need to talk to you for a minute.” 

Her office, at least, is devoid of obnoxious decorations save for a few tastefully-placed bouquets.  Sitting down just means more pain when she inevitably has to get back up again, so Bernadette props herself against her desk and gestures for April to close the door.

“Got an assignment for you.”

Normally this simple sentence would have any young reporter leaping with excitement, but April grimaces, adjusting her heavy messenger bag higher on her shoulder.  “I’ll be honest, I’ve kind of got my hands full at the moment.”

“This won’t take long.  Just need you to pass along a message to a friend of yours.”  Bernadette checks again that the door is closed and fixes the young reporter with a meaningful look.  “Goes by ‘Donnie’.”

April’s perfectly formed eyebrows crinkle in confusion.

“I don’t think I know any Donnies.  What do they look like?”

Bernadette raises her own brow incredulously.  “Big guy.  Glasses.  Kind of a nerd.”   

April shakes her head, shrugs.  Her face is a smooth, perfect mask of mild bewilderment.

“I’m sorry, but I still don’t know who you’re talking about.”

She’s good.  _Damn_ but she’s good.  Bernadette makes a mental note to re-evaluate her current assignments.  Maybe they’ve been wasting her on froth.

“Sure, sure.  Just...  If you see him—”  She hesitates, unsure of how much she wants to say, _should_ say.  “—tell him I said thanks.”

There’s a knock at the door before April can respond.  One of their researchers, her arms loaded with a smart pad and a thick stack of files.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but I’ve got something I really think you should see.”

Bernadette dismisses April with a wave of her hand, and the young reporter slips gratefully back onto the floor, shooting one last, befuddled glance over her shoulder. 

Damn, _damn_ good.

“I wanted to show you before any of my editors.  It’s about the collapse.”

The researcher—Emma?—sets her files on the desk with a heavy thunk, spins the pad around where Bernadette can see, and presses play on the already cued video.  It’s grainy even at this compressed size, the color muted and the figures blurred at the edges, their movements slightly too fast in the choppy characteristic of low-frame security cameras. A high angle view of a subway platform.  The hairs on Bernadette’s arm go stiff as she recognizes the vantage point and pattern of the milling crowd from the looped coverage she watched while recuperating.

“Fifteen seconds before the crash,” explains the researcher.  “This is non-exclusive, of course.  There’s you.”  She points unnecessarily to the blue-jacketed figure stepping towards the platform edge as the rest of the crowd shrinks back, mass of black curls tilting as she cranes her head to get a better look at the shower of sparks bursting out of the tunnel.   

The crash isn’t any easier to watch the hundredth time around.

“This is part of what I wanted to show you.”  She pauses the video, frowns, drags her finger back and forth along the control bar until she finds a point just before the first car leaps over the edge of the platform.  “Here.”

She points at a dark shape deep in the background.  Bernadette adjusts her glasses, leaning forward to peer at the screen.  At first glance it’s just a blob, maybe the first chunk of concrete to fall free from the ceiling, maybe a bit of debris kicked up by the train as it reared off of the tracks.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Oh, sorry.”  She turns the pad 90 degrees.  “Try looking at it like that.”

The shape resolves itself into something that might be humanoid, legs splayed and body twisted.  Looking over its shoulder as it runs away, inhumanly large head ending in two large spikes.

Bernadette remembers the half-second before the collapse.  The animal bellow that was almost like laughter.

“It’s a blob,” she says.  “Why am I looking at a blob?”

“I know this is going to sound crazy,” says Emma (no, no, that’s not right, it’s—), and thanks to April O’Neil Bernadette knows exactly where this conversation is about to go.  “But some of the survivors reported some kind of monster hitting the train, punching it off of its tracks.  I thought it was all junk, but then I found this.”

She cues up another video.  Same station, same camera, three months ago according to the time stamp.  There’s nobody waiting on the platform, not that it matters to the express roaring through, the cars almost a blur as they power through the straight.

“The train that derailed was going too fast when it came into the station.  That we already know from looking at the accident footage.  There’s a lot of dispute about _why_ it was going so fast, though, so I decided to go back through all of the archived security footage and see if there’s a history of drivers coming in hot.  There is and there isn’t; this express is technically breaking the regulated speed limit, but it’s well within what that stretch of track is rated for.  But look—”

She doesn’t bother fiddling with the control bar, minimizing the video player and bringing up a photo gallery of enhanced video stills.  She flicks through them slowly, showing one frozen car after another, then pauses, zooms in on a particular car, and hands the pad over for Bernadette’s inspection.

Four dark shapes clinging to the roof, their bodies round and limbs closely tucked.  It’s hard to tell with the poor color quality, but unlike the dark grey smeared with dirty yellow of the first blobs, these figures are green.

“I did some calculations using the known dimensions of the train,” she says.  “And whoever, _whatever_ that is clinging to the top of the train, they’re _huge_.  Like, six ten easy, maybe taller, and built like tanks.  And if witnesses are to be believed, one of them punched a 42 ton subway car so hard a whole train derailed.”

The researcher steels herself, hands gripped low and tight in front of her in an attempt to hide their shaking.

“The Shredder’s escape, that thing in the sky.  These... _beings_ in the subways.  What if it’s just the beginning?  The beginning of something _big_?”

Bernadette looks the young woman over, taking in her thick-rimmed glasses and tousled hair pulled back in a high ponytail, her clothes plain and ill-fitting as if trying to apologize for the intensity of the fire burning deep in her eyes.

She wonders, just for a moment, if she was wrong to stop thinking that she could change the world.

“Irma, isn’t it?”

Irma stands up a little straighter and adjusts her glasses.  “Yes ma’am.”

“You took this job so you could tell people the truth, right?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“So tell me the truth; you remember those videos of those Russian tower climbers?  What happened less than a week after we aired that?”

Irma’s knuckles pale as her grip tightens.  “Two kids tried to climb the Sachs antenna with a GoPro and some rope from their mom’s garage.  The youngest one fell and...”

She doesn’t finish the sentence.  She doesn’t have to.

“We’re the news,” Bernadette says, slow, firm, but not unkind.  “More importantly, we’re the _local_ news.  When we’re good, we tell the people what happened and why.  When we’re _great_ , we leave them with an understanding of why a story is important to _them_ , as members of the community.  And every day, good or great, _we_ have to ask ourselves _why_ any story _is_ news.  _Why_ it deserves to be reported.

“The news is responsibility.  Responsibility to truth, sure, but also responsibility to the public.  What do they gain from any particular story?  Knowledge that helps them in their lives?  A greater understanding of the wider workings of this city, the world?  Simple entertainment?  Hell, I’ve got nothing against that.  But again, we have to think _why_ a thing is news.  _Why_ didn’t people know about it before?   _Why_ is it important that they know it now?  _What_ are they going to do with that knowledge now that they have it?  Finally, _what_ will happen to the people at the center of that story once it goes public?”

Bernadette hands back the smart pad, careful not to stare at the four blurred turtles.

“If you _really_ want to give four idiots with a YouTube channel a million hits for almost killing themselves riding a train, I’ll have HR forward your resume to Buzzfeed.  In the meantime we’ve got news to report, understand?”

Irma’s eyes are wide as saucers behind her glasses, face flush nearly up to her hairline, but she doesn’t cower, doesn’t let the tremble in her throat keep her from answering.  “Yes ma’am.”

There’s potential there.  Definite potential.

Bernadette gestures at the thick stack of files with a quick jerk of her head and snaps her fingers impatiently.

“C’mon, show me what else you got!  You were good enough to dig those yahoos out of three months of trashed security footage, surely you’re good enough to find me something worthy of the six block.”

Irma jumps, startled, and scrambles for the rest of her pitches.  “Yes _ma’am_!”

 

*

 

The next day, Bernadette Thompson takes a cab to work, with a short stop at Nasso’s for spanakopita and strawberry juice to go.

Inside her office, she finds a small, cracked  vase bearing a single white carnation half-hidden behind the orgy of more elaborate get well bouquets. 

 _“Sorry I couldn’t sign your cast”_ reads the plain white card tied to the vase with purple ribbon.  The handwriting is carefully nondescript and perfectly centered.  There is no signature.

Smiling, she takes the vase in one hand and carefully hobbles over to her desk, setting it between her phone and a photo from last year’s vacation, Janessa and Darren sporting sunglasses and blinding smiles as the sea crashes on and on behind them, the blue horizon as crisp as the edge of a disc.

Allowing herself exactly one slightly pained grunt, Bernadette eases into her chair, turns on her computer, and gets to work on the day’s news. 


End file.
